Git commit patches

Question

Is there a way to export a sequence of commits into a patch from Git. Say I need to export the last 5 commits from a repository and import them into another repository. How would I go about doing that?

Help with this would be appreciated.

Answer 1

git format-patch is designed for that purpose:

git format-patch --stdout HEAD~5 > ~/patches

The output is a readable BSD-mailbox-style file that contains patches along with some metadata such as the commit messages. To import the patches into the other repository, use git am:

git am < ~/patches

Answer 2

You can select any range you want with format-patch

git format-patch --stdout R1..HEAD > output.patch